Business Is Combat: A Fighter Pilot's guide to Winning in Modern Warfare

INTRODUCTION

In 1990, Saddam Hussein ordered the invasion of Kuwait, and in so doing put into motion the allied response known as Operation Desert Storm. In that memorably televised operation, one image was particularly memorable to me: Positioning himself behind one of the runways used by our jets, a cameraman caught a spectacular shot of twenty-four F-16s lining up for a tactical formation takeoff. Now, tactical formation takeoffs are a little unusual. For one thing, the jets don’t wait until the runway is clear. Instead, they use what is called minimum interval spacing—one jet starts rolling as another nears liftoff. Once they start, off they go, one after the other with no delay, each pilot pushing up the throttles—creating white-hot flames from the afterburners—until the entire package is in the air. It is a stirring display of air power. Even through the TV screen you could smell the JP-4 jet fuel and feel the ground shake from the thunder of the exhaust.

Now, imagine the same image, but with one tiny change: one of the pilots running toward the ramp with a donut clenched in his teeth, coffee spilling from the cup in his hand, yelling Wait! Wait! I got held up in traffic!

It wouldn’t happen. Each of those twenty-four pilots knew the package was an abort if he didn’t perform his individual part. No one was late. No one forgot to wake up on time. The only thing that might have kept one of those pilots from hitting his mark was a massive coronary, and even then he’d have been checking his watch.

The point is, the execution of that extraordinary mission came down to people. For all its bristling hardware, the most powerful asset of the United States Air Force is the same as the most power ful asset of any company—people. Jets don’t fly without pilots, and if pilots aren’t ready to man their jets, the mission fails. And if too many missions fail, battles are lost and, sooner or later, so is the war. The same holds true for any company in the world, large or small. Today, more than ever, business is combat. And without an empowered sales force, without enthusiastic marketing, without customer service people who care about their product or services, there’s no doubt—you may win a battle here and there, but you’ll lose the war.

The question is how to do it. How do you turn your customer service force into twenty-four fighter pilots ready, willing, and able to leap into the sky and engage the enemy? How do you empower your sales and marketing people so completely that they’re willing to risk life and limb for your company? There have been plenty of books about organizational structure, organizational behavior, the principles of effective management, and strategic planning in business. This book is about execution—about orienting you and your company toward the successful execution of individual missions. It outlines a people-first approach to business that aligns the company behind, not in front of, the individual missions undertaken by the individuals of the company. And its mission is to show companies how to give their employees all the tools they need not only to accomplish their daily tasks, but to excel.

What a powerful one-two punch—to have the entire organization aligned behind you, and to have the tools to win. I should know: I was an F-15 fighter pilot for the United States Air Force. Every time I strapped on my jet I had the vast resources of the entire Air Force aligned behind me like the shaft of a spear. I had an array of mechanics, handlers, and weaponeers making sure I was good to go. I had an intelligence organization on the ground to brief me on my threats and their weapons. I had weather crews updating me on the environmental picture fully and clearly. I had airborne tankers aloft if I needed fuel. I had AWACS airplanes above me monitoring every moving thing in my airspace. I had fellow pilots in a wide range of aircraft protecting me by looking to kill enemy missile sites and anti-aircraft batteries. Best of all, I had years of advanced training behind me. I knew my jet, I knew my mission, and I had the tools to execute it flawlessly. Every time I left the runway, I had what I needed in my hands, at my back, and at the ready.

That’s what this book is about—tools. Not just any tools, but fighter pilot tools. Tools that can help you win in the combat of business. The lessons in Business Is Combat show you how to apply the time-tested disciplines and doctrines of the most forward- leaning organization in the world—the fighter pilot community— to your business today. It is a distillation of countless carefully conceived strategies, procedures, methods, and standards that have turned tens of thousands of ordinary men and women into victorious fighter pilots. I know firsthand, because I’ve been through the system myself. I went from farm boy to fighter pilot in two years. When I started I barely knew how to fly; before I was done I was a flight lead and an instructor pilot in the most advanced fighter jet in the world.

I no longer fly the F-15. Today I spend my time training tens of thousands of people a year to apply the disciplines I learned in the cockpit to their own lives and in their own companies. I try to teach them everything I know about teamwork, planning, preparation, communication, discipline, observation, execution, debriefing—everything they need to know to improve their daily win ratios. It doesn’t matter whether I’m working with an accounting firm, a packaged goods manufacturer, an airline, a mass market retailer, a law firm, or an emerging technology company. It doesn’t matter what size the company is, how far its leaders went in school, or how much money its employees make. The same principles apply. Why? Ultimately, business and combat both come down to absolutes—winning or losing, putting food on your table or losing it to another person, being ready for the unexpected, taking advantage of a rapidly changing environment, or being left behind. But the tools I recommend have been forged in the heat of air combat. In the lightning-fast, unpredictable world of the digital millennium, the tools designed to keep a fighter pilot alive aren’t just relevant—they’re indispensable.

In the chapters that follow, I will demonstrate that the most effective way to harness the incredible—and sometimes hidden— power of people is to focus on execution. That’s the fighter pilot way. That’s the Air Force way. All you need are the right tools. Read on. And get ready to win.

1 FROM FARM BOY TO FIGHTER PILOT

It’s midnight in Panama. I’m lying in my cot, trying to catch some sleep, but I can’t do it. My mind is going a mile a minute and my body is restless. I toss and turn and stare up at the roof of my cinderblock bunker; my uniform is drenched in sweat. The birds and animals that were invisible during the day are alive now, calling one another in the dark. Though the sun is long gone, it’s 95 degrees. I can feel the humidity with my hand.

I’m in Central America, an F-15 pilot with the 116th Fighter Wing of the Georgia Air National Guard. We’re here on an antinarcotics mission. We’ve been tasked with intercepting unannounced intruders into Panamanian airspace, the assumption being that they’re bad guys—drug smugglers. To do this, we’re sitting five-minute strip alert, which means that if we’re called suddenly, we have to be airborne in five minutes. That’s why I’m lying awake in the middle of the night in a steaming jungle. It’s my turn to fly the alert. I’m too excited. Adrenaline is coursing through my body. My jet is sitting 100 feet away on the ramp of our jungle airstrip, fueled, armed, and ready to go. Cocked, as we say: The radios are even pretuned to the right frequencies.

Now all I have to do is get some sleep.

To put this in perspective, let me explain that this is my first real mission. Until now, it’s been all practice, training hops and basic fighter maneuvers (BFM). Realistic for sure, but not the real thing. Well, tonight it’s the real thing. Tonight I’ll be flying in a hostile environment with a fully armed F-15 for the United States Air Force. This time lives are hanging in the balance.

Gradually I surrender to bone-deep fatigue and fall asleep. My body has crashed from days of overexcitement, and it’s absolute bliss. But then, just as soon as I’m locked into deep REM sleep, the klaxon blasts through the ready room and the call goes out to scramble the jets! My eyes shoot open, but I have no idea where I am. What is this noise, this heat, these pools of sweat? Intruder!

As my mind comes swimming up slowly from the bottom of the ocean, I react. I recognize the outline of two F-15s ahead of me in the dark and run in the general direction of mine. I hit the ladder with my right foot, scramble up, and take my seat in the cockpit. I take a deep breath and look at the panel. I’m racing the clock, I think; I’ve got to get a move on. I’ve got about four minutes to get this bird in the air.

But I’m not with it. I’m groggy. It’s totally dark. The blackness in the cockpit is confusing. Now, on an F-15 there are dozens of buttons to push and switches to flip before you can start the engines and get airborne. If you had all the time in the world, it wouldn’t be a problem. But doing it quickly is another story. You have to activate all the proper switches in the proper sequence, starting on the left side of the cockpit and working your way around to the right. When I first started flying, the fastest time I ever had—dead engine to airborne—was twenty minutes. After hundreds of repetitions, I whittled the time down to fifteen minutes. Then to ten, then to five. I can still hear my instructors yelling, Murph, move it! You’ve got to do better than that!

Well, right then on the ramp in Panama I needed to do better than that. I looked sideways over at my flight lead, to see how he was doing. I looked back at my panel. I started feeling my way around the cockpit. I began to recognize things, instruments, handles, parts of the jet. And then the whole training scenario came flooding over me like a cool spring rain. Wham! I went on automatic. I reached down and pulled the JFS (jet fuel starter) handle, which initiates the start sequence in the F-15. I heard the familiar sound of the central gearbox engaging and the slow rotation of the engine’s compressor blades. My engines came to life, the lights on the panel started to glow. Suddenly things started to happen. My hands started to move with authority, my motions became precise and efficient. I worked over the switches. I read indicator lights. The jet’s systems started to align. The INS (inertial navigation system) came up to speed. All weapons tested, tuned, ready to roll. Engines normal. In two and one-half minutes I was taxiing, and thirty seconds later I was pushing up the throttles on 42,000 pounds of pure thrust, thundering down the runway with the long lick of afterburner flames trailing behind me. My heart was racing. I leaned forward in my shoulder harness. It was time to engage the enemy.

I’d been a fighter pilot since the hot July day in 1990 when I reported for duty to the 116th Fighter Wing of the Georgia Air National Guard. I got to fly the hottest jet in the hangar: the McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle, a twin afterburning beast of a jet that can routinely cruise at 1,200 miles per hour. But six years earlier, if you’d told me that’s what I’d be doing, no one would have been more surprised than I. My plan was to be a professional baseball player. Four years of college, a few years in the minors, then join my father’s company—that was it. Sure, I’d loved airplanes as a child. But F-15s? Never occurred to me. I didn’t even have a pilot’s license. I was just an ordinary guy from a small country town in Kentucky, with no interest in the military whatsoever.

Things do change.

FOUL BALL

All through my school years, my real passion was sports. I picked up any kind of ball I could get my hands on: You couldn’t keep me busy enough. Fortunately I was good enough to make the teams, and by the time I was in high school I was playing every season— football in the fall, basketball in the winter, and baseball in the spring.

One thing you have to know about me is that I’ve never been accused of lacking confidence or enthusiasm. Give me an opportunity and I’ll work myself silly to take advantage of it. Tell me it can’t be done, and I’ll show you it can be. As it happened, I excelled in baseball, so much so that I won a scholarship to play at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida. Well, that was the opportunity I wanted. Not only was I going to play well for Eckerd, I decided that I was going to parlay my brilliant play all the way up to the major leagues. Baseball became my sole focus and purpose in life. I practiced harder, played harder, and put out more than anyone on the team. I wanted to be the best player in Eckerd’s history.

Luckily, things took off right away. Even before I finished my freshman year, some professional scouts saw me and talked me into transferring to a junior college so I would be eligible for the professional draft a year earlier than in a four-year college. Who was I to argue? I left Eckerd and transferred to Pearl River Junior College in Mississippi and had a great season—until the major leagues passed me up in the draft. No draft? Well, things weren’t as bad as they seemed. I still had two years of eligibility, and I was recruited by the University of Kentucky. I signed with UK and played out my dream as a collegiate ball player. There would be no major leagues for Jim Murphy, but I had two wonderful seasons in the bluegrass country. I was happy.

A New Order

During my sophomore year in college, my dad and my uncle started a distribution company called Triple M Business Products. They offered thousands of office products, including Toshiba’s line of copy machines. Triple M fast became a presence in my life. My phone calls home were about Triple M. On holidays and vacations, my dad and I talked about Triple M. I spent weekends walking up and down shelves of inventory. I think I knew more about office products by the time I was a senior in college than half the seasoned professionals my dad had working for him.

The summer before graduation, I worked for Triple M as a salesman-in-training. Of course, I took a lot of good-natured ribbing about being the boss’s son, but my coworkers quieted down after my numbers started coming in. I poured myself into my job, hustling from one account to the next. I shot up to number four, then number two in overall sales, and even closed the very first copier sale for the entire company. Maybe I had a knack for it or maybe it was my youthful enthusiasm, but whatever the reason, by the end of the summer I was the top salesman in the whole company.

So it was no surprise that on the day I got my diploma from the University of Kentucky, my father and my uncle Joe were waiting at the end of the graduation aisle with a job offer. I was thrilled to have the chance to show them what I really could do.

When I joined Triple M full-time, I hit the ground running like Pete Rose barreling into second base. I immediately regained my spot as the top sales rep in the company; soon I was promoted to field trainer, and became responsible for training all the new salesmen. Eventually I took over the home office in Louisville. I had a full staff—service techs, salespeople, and office personnel—and I was only twenty-three years old.

I learned a lot about business in those years. Most of all I learned about people. As a manager you inevitably encounter every personality type, both in your own company and among your customers. You quickly learn that people are motivated differently and respond to different things. People are alternately weak and strong, decisive and tentative, bold and meek. I was constantly amazed at the varieties of human nature. I observed it all—not always satisfied with what I saw—and filed it away for future reference.

The Lure of Flight

The Kentucky Air National Guard is about as cool as it gets. In 1987, it had a ramp full of RF-4C Phantoms, the meanest-looking planes in the sky. The Phantom isn’t a sleek jet and it certainly isn’t brand-new, but when it comes down to a street fight, you’d rather be in an F-4 than any other plane in the sky.

That year, I happened to meet a fellow who was about to start flying those F-4 Phantoms. One Saturday afternoon he suggested we go out to the Air National Guard base just to tour around. I was in a why-not? kind of mood, so off we went. At the base we met a fighter pilot who must have read my mind: Hey, he asked, how would you like to sit in the cockpit of an F-4? Would I?

I loved selling; I even loved copiers. But I had never really been sure if it was all entirely right for me. By that point in my life, I have to admit, I was looking around, thinking about options, wondering what to do with myself. Well, sitting in that F-4 was a life- changing experience. As soon as I grabbed the canopy rails and let myself down into the cockpit, I thought, This feels right. A voice in my head said, Maybe this is what you’re going to do. Maybe this is what you were born to do. To this day I can’t explain it. There had been nothing in my background to lead me in this direction. Nobody in my family had even been in the military. But the feeling! That view out of the cockpit! A big smile creased my face. This was my turning point. I was going to be a pilot.

After I left the base, I started taking flying lessons at Bowman Field in Louisville, Kentucky, starting out in little Cessna 152s. I circled the pattern endlessly, practiced my touch-and-go landings. I learned all I could. But being the person I am, pretty soon I started asking about military aviation. Cessnas were nice, but the F-4s were the majors.

Now, becoming a fighter pilot is about as difficult as making it in the majors, and since I’d fallen flat on my face once, you’d think I would have learned. But no, I started visiting the recruiters. The Air Force recruiter wasn’t encouraging; he told me I had to be an engineer with a 3.0 grade point average to get into pilot training. Scratch that.

So I went next door and talked to the Navy. They were a lot more interested. They gave me a test, which I guess I did well on, and within a few weeks they’d called to offer me a slot. I was stunned.

I ran back to Triple M and told